Masters Degrees (English)

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Browsing Masters Degrees (English) by browse.metadata.advisor "Jones, Megan"

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    Picturing South Africa : an exploration of ekphrasis in post-apartheid fiction
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2015-12) Pretorius, Jana Lorraine; Green, Louise; Jones, Megan; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: South Africa's period of transition has given rise to new forms of cultural and artistic production, which both speak to and reflect the nation's changing social, political and ethical climate. This dissertation explores a narrative form which remains relatively uncharted in current critical conversations about post-apartheid fiction, namely ekphrasis, or the textual re-presentation of visual art. Although ekphrastic narration can be traced to the Classical antiquity, it has also emerged in seminal post-1994 texts, including Zakes Mda's The Madonna of Excelsior (2002), Patricia Schonstein's Skyline (2000) and Ivan Vladislavić's The Exploded View (2004). Consequently, this study considers how the authors have used ekphrasis to represent the 'new' South Africa, as it undergoes the precarious process of transformation. Beginning with an analysis of Mda's novel, I survey how the author employs pre-existing artworks created by the Flemish Expressionist painter-priest, Frans Claerhout, as a means of performatively rewriting the nation's troubled past, and engaging with the contemporary context of national reinvention. Specifically, I consider how the transliteration of these images serves to re-imagine the identities of black women publicly shamed and privately violated under apartheid's hegemonic ideologies. In so doing, I foreground how Claerhout's mystical protest paintings become central to the author's own narrative project of recovery, restoration and remembrance. Building on this, the chapter thereafter explores how the artworks also provide rich imaginative templates which enable Mda's narrative to challenge the social fractures and dissonances of the post-1994 transitional period. Focusing on the artist's hybridised formal aesthetic, I suggest that the ekphrasised paintings model the conditions for psychic and social transformation; consequently, their presence signals a need for malleability, improvisation and renewal, in order to rework the available categories of South African identity, and the broader socio-cultural landscape. Schonstein's Skyline, in turn, incorporates notional ekphrasis, or imaginary visual artwork, to represent South Africa's new social order based on the principles of Ubuntu. Chapter Three therefore considers how the ekphrastic pieces unsettle homogeneous paradigms of nationality, and serve to envision an inclusive, hospitable and multicultural public home-space. Diverging from Mda's and Schonstein's use of ekphrasis as a positive imperative toward transformation, however, Vladislavić's text offers a despairing portrayal of contemporary South African life. Accordingly, my final chapter explores how the fictional artworks accentuate the shortcomings of our democracy, and reinvigorate an awareness of the marginalised lives rendered invisible within the country's increasingly globalised and culturally opaque urban spaces. These ekphrastic readings illustrate, in various ways, how South African authors have specifically drawn on the visual arts to represent the post-apartheid condition in their own works, as the nation attempts to reinvent itself in the wake of a traumatic past. Thus, the study foregrounds how this synthesis of literary and visual art lends itself to opening new or alternative dialogues, critical frameworks and self-reflective spaces in contemporary transitional narratives, and indeed, within the present historical moment.
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    Redeeming loneliness : Paul Ricoeur’s strangeness and recognition in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, Home and Lila
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2017-03) Stimson, Amy; Jones, Megan; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In a dissertation which aims to bring together the work of French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, and American novelist and academic Marilynne Robinson, this study addresses themes of loneliness and its redemption in the seminal works Oneself as Another and The Course of Recognition by Paul Ricoeur, and Marilynne Robinson's novels Gilead, Home and Lila. In Robinson’s novels, loneliness is the posture of abject estrangement and the crisis of identity. This capacity to be strange in oneself echoes the strangeness of Ricoeur’s idem (sameness) and ipse (selfhood) identities, which deny the self any absolute knowledge of either itself or of the other-than-self. Both the self’s attestation of self-identity and interpretations of another’s self-narrative reveal the inevitable gap of understanding between them. Robinson demonstrates how the ostensible identity in family, or marriage, or the foundation of ‘home’ and body have the potential to deny both selfhood to the individual and, by extension, the potential to relate meaningfully with an other-than-self. However, be it via narrative or in seeking beyond itself, the self is enabled to identify and distinguish others – a paradox where its strangeness is the fellow feeling which makes them similar and recognisable to each other. Robinson suggests that this recognition, requires the practices of Biblical neighbourliness and grace, in order to restore and redeem the self from the poles of separation. The undeservedness of this neighbourly grace invokes superabundant giving, which is seen in Robinson’s novels in the practices of naming (christening) and blessing. In this dissertation, I intend both to address the dearth in academic material which addresses these subjects, and moreover, to explore the strangeness of Ricoeur’s theory of self which finds practical, narrative anchorage in the loneliness of Robinson’s characters. Furthermore, I shall establish the redemption of the estranged selves by means of Ricoeur’s theory of recognition and by examining how Robinson’s novels propose this recognition in the practices of the Neighbour and superabundant giving.
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    Redeeming loneliness: Paul Ricouer's strangeness and recognition in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, Home and Lila
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2016-12) Stimson, Amy; Jones, Megan; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In a dissertation which aims to bring together the work of French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, and American novelist and academic Marilynne Robinson, this study addresses themes of loneliness and its redemption in the seminal works Oneself as Another and The Course of Recognition by Paul Ricoeur, and Marilynne Robinson's novels Gilead, Home and Lila. In Robinson’s novels, loneliness is the posture of abject estrangement and the crisis of identity. This capacity to be strange in oneself echoes the strangeness of Ricoeur’s idem (sameness) and ipse (selfhood) identities, which deny the self any absolute knowledge of either itself or of the other-than-self. Both the self’s attestation of self-identity and interpretations of another’s self-narrative reveal the inevitable gap of understanding between them. Robinson demonstrates how the ostensible identity in family, or marriage, or the foundation of ‘home’ and body have the potential to deny both selfhood to the individual and, by extension, the potential to relate meaningfully with an other-than-self. However, be it via narrative or in seeking beyond itself, the self is enabled to identify and distinguish others – a paradox where its strangeness is the fellow feeling which makes them similar and recognisable to each other. Robinson suggests that this recognition, requires the practices of Biblical neighbourliness and grace, in order to restore and redeem the self from the poles of separation. The undeservedness of this neighbourly grace invokes superabundant giving, which is seen in Robinson’s novels in the practices of naming (christening) and blessing. In this dissertation, I intend both to address the dearth in academic material which addresses these subjects, and moreover, to explore the strangeness of Ricoeur’s theory of self which finds practical, narrative anchorage in the loneliness of Robinson’s characters. Furthermore, I shall establish the redemption of the estranged selves by means of Ricoeur’s theory of recognition and by examining how Robinson’s novels propose this recognition in the practices of the Neighbour and superabundant giving.
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    Thinking through postcolonial climate justice with Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2023-12) Joubert, Isabelle Elena; Jones, Megan; Jones, Megan, 1979-; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The MaddAddam Trilogy by Margaret Atwood is a much-studied, pioneering work of climate fiction. It is celebrated for its exploration of the place of the human within the web of life, its critique of neoliberal capitalism, and its navigation of horrific climate disasters. However, in all the work produced around the trilogy, there is little that considers the implications of the series for the postcolony. In this study, I provide a close reading of the trilogy and place it in conversation with postcolonial and anticapitalist thinkers. I examine the stimulus that the trilogy provides for thinking through climate justice in a poor and postcolonial context, the consequent demands of the most vulnerable on the efforts of climate justice, and the ideologies and ecophilosophies that hamper the development of bespoke, reparative environmental action. The trilogy provides a deft navigation of the experiences of the environmentally vulnerable, demonstrating the correlation between privilege and exposure to climate catastrophe. It denounces the trends in ecological discourse that blame homogenous humanity, call for depopulation, and ignore or negatively impact the postcolony. Moreover, it locates the origins of such ecophilosophies in reductive epistemological frameworks. Finally, it cultivates hope for the postcolony by suggesting that change is possible through its exposure of the farcical belief that the harmful status quo is inevitable and unchangeable. There are several limitations which complicate the trilogy’s fruitfulness as anintellectual tool for engaging the issue of decolonised environmentalism. However, the successes of the series outweigh its limitations, and ultimately, The MaddAddam Trilogy is a nuanced work that drives the reader to consider the ecological and social needs of the poor and the postcolony. It exposes the failures of dominant environmental discourse that must be avoided in the development of climate justice that amplifies the survival chances of the most vulnerable. Finally, it fosters the energising hope that change to the systems that have produced our climate crisis – and the social inequality that makes poor humans most vulnerable to ecological decline – is possible through collective reimagination and action.